tl,dr: how to get samples from inaccessible places
These mineral flecks — some too small to see even under a microscope — offer a peek into Earth’s otherwise unreachable interior. In 2014, researchers glimpsed something embedded in these minerals that, if not for its deep origins, would’ve been unremarkable: water.

Not actual drops of water, or even molecules of H20, but its ingredients, atoms of hydrogen and oxygen embedded in the crystal structure of the mineral itself. This hydrous mineral isn’t wet. But when it melts, out spills water. The discovery was the first direct proof that water-rich minerals exist this deep, between 410 and 660 kilometers down, in a region called the transition zone, sandwiched between the upper and lower mantles.

Inhaled and ingested submicron and micron-sized crystals and crystal aggregates are associated with chronic inflammatory degenerative diseases. Diseases of the lung, exemplified by silicosis and asbestosis, result of inhalation of crystalline silica and asbestos. Crystals of sodium urate, cystine, calcium oxalate dihydrate and calcium pyrophosphate dihydrate are associated with chronic inflammatory degenerative diseases of the joints, kidneys, and urinary tract.
Pigment-grade TiO2, typically of rutile phase and of 200–300 nm particle diameter, about half the wavelength of visible light, is widely used. Because of its 2.6 index of refraction, it constitutes the dominant light-scattering, that is, “white” component of indoor wall paints, drinks, foods, toothpastes, medications, cosmetics, paper, and plastics. The annual production of pigment-grade TiO2 has increased in the past 50 years from 2 × 106 tons to 6 × 106 tons, as TiO2 replaced the earlier used, more toxic, lead carbonate white pigment. Consumers and patients are routinely exposed to TiO2 crystals, inhaling and ingesting these.

Cardano did not steal Tartaglia’s solution and in my naivety I had assumed that everybody with an interest in the history of mathematics already knew the true story, obviously this is not the case so I have decided to retell it here, for once dealing with a couple of real life Renaissance Mathematicae.

Twenty years ago this week the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled, “The Scandal of Poor Medical Research,” Altman wrote that much research was “seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative samples, small samples, incorrect methods of analysis, and faulty interpretation.” Twenty years later I fear that things are not better but worse.

Conducts research and collects data on the global history of labour, workers, and labour relations

Big news! An experiment called MiniBooNE at Fermilab in Chicago has found more evidence that neutrinos are not acting as the Standard Model says they should:

it's rumored that GS influenced frank herbert, esp. regarding the bene gesserit

Here, we present short excerpts from nine of Dyson’s letters, with a focus on his relationship with the physicist Richard Feynman. Dyson and Feynman had both professional and personal bonds: Dyson helped interpret and draw attention to Feynman’s work—which went on to earn a Nobel Prize—and the two men traveled together and worked side by side.

Why do we perceive background-color: #9B51E0 as this particular purple?

This is one of those questions where I thought I’d known the answer for a long time, but as I inspected my understanding, I realized there were pretty significant gaps.

Through an exploration of electromagnetic radiation, optical biology, colorimetry, and display hardware, I hope to start filling in some of these gaps. If you want to skip ahead, here’s the lay of the land we’ll be covering:

It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money.

The big proclamations came almost exclusively from theoretical physicists; CERN didn’t promise anything they didn’t deliver. That is an important distinction, but I am afraid in the public perception the subtler differences won’t matter. It’s “physicists said.” And what physicists said was wrong. Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow.

This is news to me…though maybe not to you.  Since I first read about the Pygmalion effect as a first-year college student I ‘ve bored countless friends and acquaintances with this study.  It was a conversational lodestone; I could find expectancy effects everywhere and so talked about them frequently.  No more, or at least not nearly so simplistically.  The original Pygmalion Effect is seductive baloney.

What has really crushed my spirit today is the history of the Pygmalion Effect.  It turns out that when it was published it set off a wave of debate that very closely mirrors the current replication crisis.  Details are below, but here’s the gist:

Dragonfly is an innovative, multi-lens array designed for ultra-low surface brightness astronomy at visible wavelengths. Commissioned in 2013 with only three lenses, the array is growing in size and proving capable of detecting extremely faint, complex structure around galaxies. The most recent upgrade—completed in 2016—saw Dragonfly grow to 48 lenses in two clusters.

Dragonfly is designed to reveal the faint structure by greatly reducing scattered light and internal reflections within its optics. It achieves this using commercially available Canon 400mm lenses with unprecedented nano-fabricated coatings with sub-wavelength structure on optical glasses.

JUDEA PEARL AND DANA MACKENZIE
THE BOOK OF WHY: THE NEW SCIENCE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
New York: Basic Books, Forthcoming May 2018

I include these two examples to make two points. First, note how one person clearly stole from the other one. Second, note how sloppy these fabricators are. They include a Confucius quote that directly contradicts what the numbers say. On the left side of the visuals, Confucius is purported to say that hearing is better than seeing, while the numbers on the right of the visuals say that seeing is better than hearing. And, by the way, Confucius did not actually say what he is being alleged to have said! What seems clear from looking at these and other examples is that people don’t do their due diligence—their ends seems to justify their means—and they are damn sloppy, suggesting that they don’t think their audiences will examine their arguments closely.

You may recall that this was extracted from an article titled Szeged in 1934.

That is because the author, Lorch, decided that he was not cut out for the job, and fled to Hungary.

In late 2016, the paper motivating our physiognomy essay seemed well outside the mainstream in tech and academia, but as in other areas of discourse, what recently felt like a fringe position must now be addressed head on. Kosinski is a faculty member of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and this new study has been accepted for publication in the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Much of the ensuing scrutiny has focused on ethics, implicitly assuming that the science is valid. We will focus on the science.
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tl,dr: it's not

If I can sit here and calculate the Debye temperature, you can too. If I can sit here and find Green’s functions, by god, you can too. If I can bang my head against my desk in frustration because I can’t figure out how to solve some crazy stat mech problem, you can too. If I can stay awake at night freaking out about the EPR paradox and the foundations of quantum mechanics, you damn well can too. Seriously. Instead of watching an extra hour of TV, go pick up a calculus textbook, or a book about the standard model – anything!

It’s no different than picking up a work of literature. It’s nothing more than trying to understand the world around you, learning to see it in new and different (and beautiful) ways. If I can learn physics, then so can you.

The McNamara fallacy (also known as quantitative fallacy[1]), named for Robert McNamara, the United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others.

ritual and arbitrary rules are important to open up intuition (cf. tarot & reading [ppl, geology, water]) - i'm sliding with flatbladet and Douglas Adams

Although it’s the right thing to do, it’s never easy to admit error — particularly when you’re an extremely high-profile scientist whose work is being dissected publicly. So while it’s not a retraction, we thought this was worth noting: A Nobel Prize-winning researcher has admitted on a blog that he relied on weak studies in a chapter of his bestselling book.

The blog — by Ulrich Schimmack, Moritz Heene, and Kamini Kesavan — critiqued the citations included in a book by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist whose research has illuminated our understanding of how humans form judgments and make decisions and earned him half of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sadly, the ideas espoused in his letter echo the same pseudoscience peddled by eugenicists and white supremacists for decades—and they’re unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Sweden’s Transport Agency moved all of its data to “the cloud”, apparently unaware that there is no cloud, only somebody else’s computer. In doing so, it exposed and leaked every conceivable top secret database: fighter pilots, SEAL team operators, police suspects, people under witness relocation. Names, photos, and home addresses: the list is just getting started. The responsible director has been found guilty in criminal court of the whole affair, and sentenced to the harshest sentence ever seen in Swedish government: she was docked half a month’s paycheck.

An easy straw poll is provided by the topic tags on the site. At the time of writing, there are 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. The distribution is inevitably influenced by editorial bias - but as the editor, I can confirm that the only conscious negative bias is my lack of enthusiasm for medical titles. I would love to include more good popular chemistry titles - but I don't see many.

If you have ever star-gazed shortly after sunset or before sunrise, you have probably noticed one or two "stars" sailing gracefully across the sky. These are Earth-orbiting satellites, visible due to the reflection of the Sun's light off their surfaces toward the observer. Hundreds of satellites are visible to the unaided eye; thousands are visible using binoculars and telescopes. Observing satellites has many enthusiasts around the world.

In 1984, Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer argued that Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) explained planetary motion by using mathematical devices and astronomical models originally developed by Islamic astronomers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Was this a parallel development, or did Copernicus somehow learn of the work of his predecessors, and if so, how? And if Copernicus did use material from the Islamic world, how then should we understand the European context of his innovative cosmology? Although Copernicus’s work has been subject to a number of excellent studies, there has been little attention paid to the sources and diverse cultures that might have inspired him.

Foregrounding the importance of interactions between Islamic and European astronomers and philosophers, Before Copernicus explores the multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual context of learning on the eve of the Copernican revolution, determining the relationship between Copernicus and his predecessors. Essays by Christopher Celenza and Nancy Bisaha delve into the European cultural and intellectual contexts of the fifteenth century, revealing both the profound differences between “them” and “us,” and the nascent attitudes that would mark the turn to modernity. Michael Shank, F. Jamil Ragep, Sally Ragep, and Robert Morrison depict the vibrant and creative work of astronomers in the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish worlds. In other essays, Rivka Feldhay, Raz Chen-Morris, and Edith Sylla demonstrate the importance of shifting outlooks that were critical for the emergence of a new worldview.

Highlighting the often-neglected intercultural exchange between Islam and early modern Europe, Before Copernicus reimagines the scientific revolution in a global context.

This site is developed and maintained by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. A variety of documents, images, software for various machines, and interactive Web resources are available here; click on entries in the frame to the left to display a table of contents for that topic. Items which span more than one category are listed in all.

Vectors Website Map

01 may 17 / greg goebel / follow "gvgoebel" on twitter
* This page provides a list of all titles on the site. Please note that all written materials here are in the public domain. All bitmaps marked with "GVG / PD" are in the public domain, anything else I can't give permissions for. Feel free to repost or reuse all public-domain materials from this site, though crediting the source and providing a link to this site would be very much appreciated.

The Vectors website is dedicated to educational writings on science, technology, and history. Associated sites include:

AirVectors, an aircraft encyclopedia.

The DayVectors blog on science, technology, and sociopolitical trends.

My Amazon.com list of Kindle ebooks

A Flickr archive of photographs I've taken, including a fair number of aircraft, as well as retouch jobs of old paperback covers.

In the first historical record of the telescope, a letter of introduction for its inventor, Hans Lipperhey, from the Councillors of Zeeland to the States General in Den Hague, this wonderful invention that would revolutionise astronomy had no name and was referred to as “a certain device, by means of which all things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby, by looking through glasses…” Not exactly a phrase that rolls off the tongue. In the first printed account of this new invention, a French pamphlet reporting on the visit of the Siamese Ambassador to the Court of Prince Maurice of Nassau during which the telescope was first demonstrated in public, it is just referred to as ‘lunettes’ the French for glasses leading to a possible confusion with ordinary eye glasses or spectacles.

This research investigated how different forms of overconfidence correlate with age. Contrary to stereotypes that young people are more overconfident, the results provide little evidence that overestimation of one’s performance or overplacement of one’s performance relative to that of others is correlated with age. Instead, the results suggest that precision in judgment (confidence that one knows the truth) increases with age. This result is strongest for probabilistic elicitations, and not present in quantile elicitations or reported confidence intervals. The results suggest that a lifetime of experience, rather than leading to better calibration, instead may increase our confidence that we know what we’re talking about.